Ocean Solitaire: The Story of Declining Fish Populations

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That's the new world you contemplate from the tip of Cape Bonavista—the end of abundance, the end of growth. "I think that the world fish catch is the first global limit we've reached," Lester Brown, Worldwatch's founder, remarked as we sat eating crab cakes in a Washington restaurant. The questions, then, are these: How could we afford to eat crab cakes for lunch? Why is there still seafood in your supermarket? Why, in fact, are Alaskan salmon fishermen getting less per pound for their catch now than they did a few years ago?

A large part of the answer is that we've learned to farm many species that we used to catch at sea—learned to grow big fish in small ponds. Aquaculture produces nearly 20 million tons of fish a year now, which means that even with the declines in the marine catch, we're consuming more fish than we ever have before.

The "cornucopian" theorists hold up fish farming as a proof of their theory that there are no limits we can't overcome. Julian Simon, a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland who is known as a pro­population growth "doomslayer," is the granddaddy of this argument. One of his intellectual heirs is Mark Sagoff, a researcher for the Institute of Philosophy and Public Policy who wrote in The Atlantic Monthly last year that aquaculture shows that "our economy depends far more on the progress of technology than on the exploitation of nature, [and] resource scarcities do not exist or are easily averted." Sure, people may deplete the oceans, and our populations may outstrip their capacity to provide us with food. We are, after all, giants—a modern American uses as many calories of energy each day as a sperm whale. But giant people possess giant brains, big enough to figure out ways around any of our problems. And what better way than farming fish? It allows us to bypass the messy problems of trying to control an almost uncontrollable industry and instead raise our "seafood" in ponds, under nice controlled conditions.

Maybe so—maybe fish farming is proof that we don't really need to worry much. But fish farming is not exactly carefree and benign. Fish farmers often devastate the places where they grow their crops. Great swaths of the world's coastal mangrove forests, for instance, have been cut down to build shrimp farms. By one recent estimate, Thailand harvested 120,000 tons of shrimp from its fish farms between 1985 and 1990, but lost a potential fish harvest of 800,000 tons because the spawning grounds in the mangrove swamps had been eradicated.

And you've got to feed the fish. Many fish—salmon, for instance—are carnivorous foragers high on the ocean's food chain. If you want to raise them in a pond, you need to dump in fish meal for them to eat. That's what's happening to a lot of that pilchard and anchovy that fishermen have been hauling in; they've become Salmon Chow. The marine food chain has been changed so that now we perform for the salmon the job of catching their dinner, a job they used to do for free. Meanwhile, by continuing to take so many forage fish out of the water, we reduce the chance that wild stocks will ever recover. It's like clear-cutting a forest and then making mulch for tree farms by grinding up whatever saplings poke their heads above the ground.

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